Released June 5, 2026,
on Section Eight Arthouse and Loma Vista Recordings.
Vince Staples made an impression on us ten years ago when he drew inspiration from Unknown Pleasures for the cover of Summertime ’06. As it turns out, that nod to Joy Division seems to have been more than a passing whim. His latest album – his first for his own label, Section Eight Arthouse – goes well beyond the imagery. With its live instrumentation, abrasive guitars and springy basslines, not to mention raps that hit like slogans, it is punk through and through. And, like several other records in an already phenomenal discography, it is very good.
If the music on Cry Baby is often furious, that is because its mood is too. Here, Vince Staples draws a line under the introspection of his recent albums and delivers a political broadside. After all, as he reminds us on “The Running Man,” his inner traumas are ultimately bound up with his experience as a Black American. With Donald Trump now serving a second term – isn’t that bawling blond baby on the cover meant to be the president? – the rapper does not mince his words. An American empire born in blood, the Black experience, racial injustice, police brutality: it is all there from the very first track, “Blackberry Marmelade,” delivered with the kind of sarcasm that has always been one of punk’s defining virtues. And it comes with an appropriately shocking video, staging the mass murder of Black men.
With the exception of “White Flag,” where a battle-weary Vince Staples seems to give up the fight against white supremacy, he turns to rock because it is such an effective vehicle for anger. Through it, with equal measures of irony and pessimism, he takes aim at police harassment (“Go! Go! Gorilla”), the lie of the American Dream (“Only In America”), the exploitation of Black people that continues in today’s music industry (“Cotton”), the controlling influence of a television set that still seems permanently tuned to Channel 0 (“TV Guide”), and the absurdity of war (“7 In The Morning”).
The message itself is an old one: that of Black activists railing against Amerikkka. Staples may be making punk, but he recasts it through an African American perspective. Nor does he forget the classics. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” is sampled on “The Big Bad Wolf,” while “Go! Go! Gorilla” alludes to 2Pac’s “Thugz Mansion.” The video for “Blackberry Marmelade,” meanwhile, closes with a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. With Cry Baby, Vince Staples stakes out a place in a long tradition: that of Black artists brilliantly reclaiming rock as their own music.
